LS/ASCO – Living Systems^®
Autonomic Service Composition & Orchestration

LS/ASCO is a new-generation SOA-compliant service orchestration tool that enables the creation and execution of dynamic service compositions with goal-oriented logic.

Features and benefits of LS/ASCO

While SOA technologies are expected to increase business agility by reducing the gap between IT services and enterprises' business goals and opportunities, most current SOA solutions lack the required flexibility and adaptability demanded by today's highly complex and dynamic markets. This is because of limited capability to semantically acquire, orchestrate and optimize value-added services into agile compositions.

With its unique and innovative set of features LS/ASCO helps realize agile SOA-enabled business processes that can directly cope with real-time change, whether known or unanticipated.

With LS/ASCO, suitable service components are automatically discovered and orchestrated according to business goals and variable context conditions. This circumvents the need for manual composition thus reducing the effort spent on creating, adapting, and integrating composed services.

Autonomic self-management mechanisms ensure that the overall composition is capable of optimizing and surviving through autonomic adaptation, supporting rapid reaction to changing business and operational requirements.

Key features

Extended BPM run-time process agility through smooth integration of service composition

By means of its seamless integration with the Living Systems Process Suite, LS/ASCO augments the run-time agility of business processes through the dynamic discovery and selection of new or existing process components, which are expressed as services offered by different people, organizational units, applications, and systems:

• Each process can be wrapped as a service that can be automatically invoked by other processes, applications, and services.
• Any service, either atomic or composed, is publishable and thus directly available to business processes at both modeling and execution times.

Easy creation of compound services

LS/ASCO offers goal-driven composition of services via a graphical interface that allows building, editing, and testing the composition logic in a intuitive way (goal-based formalism), without the need of low-level coding – decoupling business and service logic from service enablers:

• With simple drag and drop, services can be selected from service catalogs that make them directly available to final end users.
• Orchestration can be automated with semantic discovery and autonomic composition of service components.

On-demand and context-aware service composition

LS/ASCO enables real-time, context-sensitive definition of composed services with dynamic discovery of constituent components employing semantic matchmaking techniques. Service components selection is controlled with a dedicated reasoning engine according to specified business goals and domain-specific ontologies expressing functional and non-functional service properties.

Reliable QoS-based service provisioning

LS/ASCO autonomic maintenance of service orchestrations supports automatic run-time re-configuration or replacement of service components according to quality and performance metrics. This enables sounder assurance processes and thus service delivery with assured Quality of Service.

Seamless integration of services sourced from external markets

Through dynamic Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation, contracting, and management mechanisms, LS/ASCO supports the flexible integration of services offered by third-party providers and service marketplaces.

Enterprise-ready

LS/ASCO's tools are Eclipse-based with the run-time engine supporting both Java EE and Java SE environments. Thanks to its LS/TS underpinning, LS/ASCO is easy to integrate.

Standards support

LS/ASCO supports the latest releases of standard technologies including WSDL, SAWSDL, SOAP, UDDI, BPMN, and WSBPEL.

Key benefits

LS/ASCO's comprehensive and unique service orchestration delivers:

• Rapid and simplified management of SOA-enabled value chains
• Reduced time-to-market and efforts for new product and service roll-out
• Reduced service delivery costs
• Agile mapping of business goals into the application and service orchestration
• Increased user experience
• Improved customer satisfaction and higher retention